a digital codex of contemporary pan-american writing

Issue 20

by Elizabeth Jacobson In New Mexico, northern saw-whets are not a common sight, but just now, I see one, huddled in sleep, tucked close to the trunk on a snowy pinon bough. It startles awake as I cross the yard to the compost heap, blinks its golden cat eyes three times, and doesn’t fly away. […]

by Elizabeth Jacobson From the bench above the pond I watch two ducks make dark channels in the water as they feed, pathways through a mosaic of cracked green ice. Behind me the rocks, strata of red igneous beneath ochre sandstone, are an unconformity —a geologic span— characterized by an immense amount of nothing between […]

translation by Natalia Sucher It fits that time is measured with the stark Shadow a column in summer Casts or with the water of that river In which Heraclitus saw our madness, Since time and destiny Resemble each other: the imponderable Daytime shadow and the irrevocable course Of the water that follows its way. It […]

by Sergio Ortiz Eloy put a few seeds in my hand. Thirty trees tomorrow, a forest fifty years later, birds find the South in those trees, wolves discover shelter. And ants grow like a body between blind, sleepy roots. At some point a house and another house built by those woods and winter lowered inside […]

by Marc Vincenz Observe, observe the doctor twisting in her smattering of sunlight, the pensive hammering of her elusive tender fingers, observe too the rosette of her birthmark flowering for bees and glorious butterflies, for those pollinators poised beneath her delicate earlobe —and she, within the swirling-whir of insect-laden night, listening for the scrape and […]

By Marc Vincenz Is this a dog heaven? or a heaven dogged? Is this the doggerel of a man or a bird? In the sweet crust of time, no haven bent on the edge of self-discovery, of a wanting- to-become, a thick slice of homemade pie still steaming on the window ledge of childhood— hurtling […]

by Marc Vincenz (I am) shriveled up into such a narrow compass as is filled by my own bodily sensations… —Galileo The middle shifted— you could barely see it for all the crowd and yet how great their sublime force of attraction of pure light they flowered in his palm and wobbled as he danced […]

by Ari Wolff The bones were so severed I forgot who I was beneath them or how I had come to live such in a vespertine city. I walked the streets with the same uncertainty my grandmother had when she held a smartphone for the first time. Under the gaze of new blue LED streetlights […]

by Marina Carreira Remember how you told me I was home to more than the way a sunflower opens in the morning: all head, glorious gold. It still hurts after all this time, but not because you were my other half (I am not split; perhaps, this is why I could never attach) but because […]

by Marina Carreira The heavens—spectacular that Thursday evening. We walked, my hand in yours up the hillside, declaring the pink in the sky (me), and you (the blue). We found this horizon playful, the blue on top of the pink, like us, like our teenage lovemaking. The trees asleep, their arms grazing the leave-strewn ground, […]

by Asdrubal Quintero 1. Coco Fusco says, “dying is a woman’s last choice” so she returned home. She sees her grandmother’s corpse in Spain propped on dollar-store flowers, wrapped by tea candles– skin like chicharrones. 2. My mother slips into the muddy river, cuts the bottom of her foot on a buried seashell rudder, gropes […]

by Jenny Irizary Peaked tower no bell surrounded by shutters hand-painted cross look of a neon sign blinking dusk’s last spoiled strawberry soft black-eyed bless youa for sending the photos that’s the church (my mother’s church) I’d like to go back some time hear the band like it was 1959 the backsliders one guy claimed […]

by Madeleine Beckman A wreath of skulls followed her around a halo of death multitudes of grief a gift to remember not to forget the dodged bullets bits of good fortune jewels of days dusks dawns, horizons still to kiss.

by Mercedes Lawry I see absence in the scalded sky and in the parched dirt, in arroyos and permafrost, in bleached coral, deltas bronze with oil, in the eyes of others, in the shallows of intent. In spoiled rivers, I wade among dead fish, the sun still golden, golden, and I see absence beyond the […]

by Valerie Jeremijenko In the way of dreams and memories, we were hitching by the road again, this time by the exit of the Threeways truck stop with the woman within watching. The boys, like the sense of time, were long gone and the road stretched lazily through the undulating, dusty desert while behind us […]

by MK Ahn Auntie stands here washing buckets of vegetables under freezing water, looking at the lines in her hands. Each has a memory—a smell, a sound, a picture. Like that scar on her left pointer finger, smelling of onion, of Uncle’s favorite pot roast covered in half moons of vegetables. She is cooking, Eva […]

by Ana Hurtado The fog descends at seven. In Saturno, from apartment 14C, Pablo’s family can see the Andean mist take over their González Suárez neighborhood: with goosebumps on their skin, the volleyball team from the all-girls escuela católica waits for their after-school bus outside as traffic becomes imperceptible, the tainted palm trees that align […]

Most of my work relates to my experience as a European living in the U.S.I came here in 1985 from Warsaw. My connection to Poland is very strong, so culturally I belong to the two worlds. In my work I address the problems with complete understanding on both verbal and non-verbal levels, adaptation, nostalgia, isolation, […]

Andrea Lambert works in figurative oils, mixed media and collage critically referenced as “kitschy maximalism.” Her work is featured in Angel’s Flight Literary West, Entropy, Hinchas de Poesias, Queer Mental Health and Anodyne Magazine. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland and San Diego. CalArts MFA. She is the author of Jet […]

Elizabeth Jacobson is the author of a chapbook, A Brown Stone (Dancing Girl Press), a full-length collection, Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books), and Are the Children Make Believe? (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, 2017). She directs the WingSpan Poetry Project which conducts poetry classes at local shelters. Recent work has appeared or is […]